1374:y
Being vegan is like belonging
to a family. It’s my ‘group’. It’s nice to belong and to be amongst people I
can identify with. It’s even nicer to
feel special, since we all want to feel special. We like being special to our family, to our
circle of friends. Most of all we’d like
to be special to our whole town, and what we wouldn’t give to be famous in our
own country? The bigger the group that
'knows us and respects us’, the more special we feel. Many people would willingly sell their soul
for fame. And all this is within the
bounds of possibility, but only on condition we stay loyal to Society and its
core values.
If the values of our society
seem wrong and we have to move away from it, as vegans certainly do, then we
can expect ostracism and people’s deliberate misunderstanding of us. It’s the opposite of approval. We end up feeling alienated, and since no one
likes being excluded we all try to look as normal as possible. No one wants to look like a freak.
Yet vegans accept all this
downside and stand against almost the whole of their society, caring nothing
for their own wants, other than being given the chance to explain why.
As a society we all more or
less dress the same, talk the same, behave the same, that is, until we come to
something we can’t accept, which we must speak out against, even if we’re going
to be harshly judged for it. To vegans,
that very judgement is the worst thing we have to put up with from our society.
It’s the unfairness of the judgement
that makes many of us so angry, because some of our very sensible arguments are
being wantonly ignored. And they’re
being ignored by people who are obviously capable of understanding them.
Animal Rights advocates often
feel like victims, and that’s bad enough, but there are dangers for us in this;
we victims tend to show it. It can looks
‘martyr-ey’. It can seem like conceit,
as if we are feeling superior to others. In response to being made to feel like a
victim, we are tempted to become victimisers ourselves, with our swag of
arguments at hand. We seem to be the
types of people who want to be judging those who don’t agree with us.
The real reason behind
Society’s harsh judgment of us is that we seem to be following principles which
haven’t even been thought about by the average omnivore. So, from our vegan point of view, it seems
like a no-win game we play with our adversaries: it starts off reasonably
enough, then, when dialogue changes to a vegan monologue, it all goes
pear-shaped. It’s hard to know where we
should stop, especially when we’re getting no intelligent counter arguments. It’s easy for us to go too far, and maybe blow
our whole relationship with a person, by being too ‘over the top’ with what we
say. Sometimes if we spot an
unreasonable disagreement, we become aggressive in order to make ourselves (and
our good sense) heard. And if the
response to what we say seems frivolous, we might feel compelled to show how
deeply we feel about Animal Rights issues. And then it’s a fine line between being
assertive and being aggressive.
To be outrageously noisy is
one thing - making value judgements about people to their faces is another. It’s usually counter productive. Today, at a place I was working, a client said
to me, “I see you’re a vegetarian” (he’d read the slogans on my bike, and
thought it said something about animal eating) and I hit back with, “Yes, I
don’t eat what you’re eating” (he was eating meat stew for lunch). I thought about it afterwards. That was a rude way of replying, even though I
said it as ‘a laugh’. Perhaps I was
miffed, because he’d been cooking beef for his lunch and I couldn’t stand the
smell, and couldn’t remove myself as I normally would. He’d been innocently making himself some
lunch, as he does everyday.
I looked back on it, when I
got home in the evening. I got to
thinking “me different to him”. Apart
from his beef lunch and he being thirty years older than me, he was overall a
much nicer person than me. And that made
me think!
As soon as there’s any
disapproval in my mind, however convincing my argument, the message of it gets
lost-in-delivery, in the sound my words make. And I know that when the message doesn’t
actually get across, I’m not being much help to the animals.
The big negative here, after
any bun-fight, is that we get a reputation for being a bit aggressive. That way we lose support all round. And, after all, the losing of friends isn’t
really the main aim here! It isn’t for
reasons of wanting to make war, that we go out on a limb in the first place.